12 Best Free Books to Learn about Haskell

9. Parallel and Concurrent Programming in Haskell by Simon Marlow

If you have a working knowledge of Haskell, this hands-on book shows you how to use the language’s many APIs and frameworks for writing both parallel and concurrent programs. You’ll learn how parallelism exploits multicore processors to speed up computation-heavy programs, and how concurrency enables you to write programs with threads for multiple interactions.

Author Simon Marlow walks you through the process with lots of code examples that you can run, experiment with, and extend. Divided into separate sections on Parallel and Concurrent Haskell, this book also includes exercises to help you become familiar with the concepts presented:

• Express parallelism in Haskell with the Eval monad and Evaluation Strategies.
• Parallelize ordinary Haskell code with the Par monad.
• Build parallel array-based computations, using the Repa library.
• Use the Accelerate library to run computations directly on the GPU.
• Work with basic interfaces for writing concurrent code.
• Build trees of threads for larger and more complex programs.
• Learn how to build high-speed concurrent network servers.
• Write distributed programs that run on multiple machines in a network.

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10. The Haskell School of Music by Paul Hudak

This book explores the fundamentals of computer music and functional programming through the Haskell programming language. Functional programming is typically considered difficult to learn. This introduction in the context of creating music will allow students and professionals with a musical inclination to leverage their experience to help understand concepts that might be intimidating in more traditional computer science settings. Conversely, the book opens the door for programmers to interact with music by using a medium that is familiar to them.

Readers will learn how to use the Euterpea library for Haskell to represent and create their own music with code, without the need for other music software. The book explores common paradigms used in algorithmic music composition, such as stochastic generation, musical grammars, self-similarity, and real-time interactive systems.

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11. What I Wish I Knew When Learning Haskell by Stephen Diehl.

This 369 page book provides a wealth of information about Haskell.

Besides the basics of the language it covers topics such as monads, strings, applicatives, error handling, GADTs, data structures, concurrency, graphics, streaming, data formats, network & web programming, databases, and much more besides.

The book is placed in the public domain.

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12. Speeding Through Haskell by Arya Popescu (formerly Mihai Radu Popescu)

This is a book that will show you around the Haskell programming language. If you’re not already familiar (or too familiar) with programming in another language, you might need to put in extra work.

This book requires a Haskell interpreter. For most people, the best option is The Haskell Platform, although alternatives like hugs exist.

This book is not finished.

This book is published under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International license.

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Pages in this article:
Page 1 – Real World Haskell and more books
Page 2 – Happy Learn Haskell Tutorial Volume 1 and more books
Page 3 – Parallel and Concurrent Programming in Haskell and more books

For a good tutorial, check our Simon Peyton Jones’s paper: Tackling the Awkward Squad: monadic input/output, concurrency, exceptions, and foreign-language calls in Haskell.

All books in this series: